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points by progforlyfe 4 days ago | 0 comments

While I love the "edgy-ness" of this, I remember doing something like this around 2013 in Manhattan and kind of enjoyed it. They had me go into a room, and gave me a paper with an open ended question: it was something along the lines of, write as much detail as I could about what happens when a user visits a URL in a web browser. E.g. explain as much as I know about TCP, HTTP requests, web servers, etc. I think I touched on how Cookies worked as well.

No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.

[–] intrasight 3 days ago

My first job interview in 1989 after college:

Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"

Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.

[–] jandrese 3 days ago

Back in 1989 that was a rare skill. Many of the engineers who had experience were working on government projects. I mean TCP barely had congestion control at that point, it was very early days.

[–] sigttou 3 days ago

"Usually we don't hire people from high school, but you had Common Lisp in your CV, so the engineers said to take you anyway." 2010, still simpler times.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

Same for me in 2006 as a junior Linux sysadmin:

“What does ifconfig do? What does it mean to mount a disk? What editor do you use? You’re hired.”

None of that culture fit nonsense.

[–] Tyr42 3 days ago

Did you say vim or emacs? Might have been culture for afterall.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

I forget. I used to use emacs but very superficially; when I started the job a literal greybeard UNIX admin shook his head and took me under his wing to teach me vim, which I used for a long time before switching back to emacs (and learning the elisp underpinnings of it)

[–] selicos 3 days ago

Do you know DNS? How does an HTTPs/SSL handshake work? Man this kid is good hire him. - 2015 era job interview

[–] mrheosuper 3 days ago

Have you finished 3 months Javascript bootcamp ? you're hired - 2019 era.

[–] intrasight 4 days ago

I'm fine with technical interviews that are "test-like", with questions and answers and discussion and with an engineer who is my technical equal. But this was not that.

[–] steveBK123 3 days ago

The more inhumane the screener the worse the job in my experience.

Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.

Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.

Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.

They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.

[–] nzjrs 4 days ago

I did this as a test in 2018! Compares to the leetcode screens now, it was a dream

[–] _whiteCaps_ 3 days ago

I love this test and will dive deep into switch debouncing on keyboards when they press the enter key.

[–] camtarn 3 days ago

I have never had the opportunity to ask this as an interview question. I'm secretly hoping that the first time I do so, somebody will lead off with "So, let's skip past the discussion of free will that might occur when considering how the user decides to visit the website, and instead start at the motor cortex..."

I'd also love a deep dive into the keyboard microcontroller that ends with the key press leaving over USB , and never even considers the main CPU.

Honestly, even the facetious answers to this have the potential to be incredibly interesting. Reality just has a ton of depth.